Falling Over (7 page)

Then someone had pointed upward, and screamed.

~

He came back into the present – it was as quick as a flick of the remote control; as disorientating as coming into a film halfway through. He knew that one of the sub-managers had just said “nothing” and flashed his colleague that quick glimpse of insubordination, but it seemed to have happened days ago. He tried to
focus
. There was, he realised, no way he could tell his manager that the new boy was Jay Neuworth’s
double
, or as near as damn it – no way to tell her his guilt-tripped fantasies about what this doppelganger had come for. No way to tell her, but maybe a way to make her
see
. She wouldn’t have known Jay from the toilet cleaners, but she would have seen his face in the newspaper. He glared at Tweedle-Dum and Dee – they might be pretending that they couldn’t see it, but surely
his
manager wasn’t part of their lowborn conspiracy?

“Come with me,” he said. “
Look
”. He had to squeeze past her to get to his office door – he felt her body stiffen, and press back against the thin partition wall, which wobbled. Their arms brushed each other and he got a hint of her scent. It was always a relief to be out of his cramped office, although the twelfth-floor light confused his eyes after his dark cubby hole – almost a relief, until he saw
him
, the new boy. But still, he tried to obey his own imperative, he tried to
look
:

The boy was probably in his mid-twenties, with a slack face, bored eyes. His hair was lank, even his skin seemed lank, seeming to slouch down from his skull with not much in the way of defining muscle in between. He had taken full advantage of the company’s casual dress policy for the temps, and wore a t-shirt that was too big for him and slumped from his frame, so that the legend
Touch Me I’m Sick!
which presumably should have emblazoned his chest, was creased into his gut. Everything about the kid seemed pulled downwards, except his eyes which looked upwards from his bowed head, with a bored and solipsistic intelligence... He...

And he looked exactly like Jay Neuworth!
The feeling of vertigo and sudden slippage overtook him again.
Exactly like
... it was all his brain could hold onto, in this new rendering of things.

One look at his manager was enough to tell him that she couldn’t see it.

He thought – maybe those two can’t see it either. Maybe it wasn’t a conspiracy, but a sign.
Only
he could see it.

His manager was looking at him, expecting something. His mind, which already felt like it was struggling with two versions of reality, couldn’t lie and create a third. If only he could find some plausible reason to get rid of the boy! But all he said was,

“I just... I don’t like the look of him, that’s all. He looks lazy and likely to turn up late, and...” It was true as far as it went.
Jay
had always turned up late.

“You can’t get rid of someone just because you don’t like the look of them,” his manager said. “This department has targets to reach. I know you’ve only just come back after... but
still
.” Her professional, unflappable countenance cracked, flapped for a second, like a vision of her twin self. “But
still
,” she repeated.

The manager looked away from her, back at the new boy. “What’s his name?” he heard his manager ask his subordinates behind him, and whichever one responded, the answer they gave jarred wrong in his head.

~

He forced himself not to hide all week in his office, but to sit at a desk in among everyone else. He flinched every time the new boy passed near, but fortunately he didn’t have to have anything directly to do with him. The one time he did sit in his office he didn’t get any work done, he just kept irritably drawing the blinds, then opening them minutes later, as if there was something outside that was a temptation. He needed to get some work done, he needed to get back into the swing of things to counter whatever insurrection and arse-licking his sub-managers were planning. He needed to catch up; he needed to
work
...

He sat at his desk and watched the ‘new boy’.

It wasn’t just that he looked like Jay Neuworth – he
moved
like him too. He moved in a way that was seemingly indolent, but also suggested speed and aggressiveness were there if needed, like a slow throw-back, a reptile. The boy didn’t blink enough, despite the fact that light was battering against the windowed walls. There was a faint noise of alarm from the manager’s computer as he made these observations, a reminder for a management meeting three floors down.

He watched how the other temps interacted with the ‘new boy’ too, after all it was conceivable that some of them had been Jay’s friends. Surely they would notice? He didn’t know which ones to watch, didn’t understand the friendships and rivalries among his team, but none of them appeared to be acting in anything other than a natural way around the new boy.

During the course of his observations he noticed some of his staff committing acts that were against company rules – one looking at a website while she should have been working, one who blatantly had twice as many fag breaks as anyone else, one who just sat and stared out the window without working for minutes at a time... No one could complain if he sacked
them
(the new boy didn’t put a foot wrong).  He did the sackings face to face, in his small office, rather than just calling the employment agencies, and he made the sub-managers attend too. It was strangely calming, it reassured him that he could actually influence reality, rather than just watch its patterns and jumps in front of him.

Still, every time he went into his office to fire someone he noticed how much it was
moving
, how much the building moved. He had never realised tall buildings could move before, with the wind, with the tremors. He noticed the movement out in the open plan part of the office too, but out there it was like being on a ferry in a rough sea; in his office it was like being in a dingy. Even the vibrations from his ringing phone seemed to set the movement off – he switched it to silent.

One boy actually
cried
when they sacked him. The manager felt a moment’s pride as he watched the idiot scuttle away to collect his things and say his goodbyes. All the other temps were watching him out of the corners of their eyes. Including
him
,
with the coldly amused eyes of someone who had just seen yet another arrow fall short of its target.

“I’m going for a piss,” he said, not even aware that he had spoken aloud. The two sub-managers glanced at each other. The manager stood still for a few seconds longer, then walked off.

It took a long time for him to relax and to be able to piss. He was in one of the cubicles, and there was a draft around his ankles, because the cubicle wall didn’t reach to the floor. The sliding bolt to lock the cubicle had a screw loose and was almost hanging off – it all seemed very fragile. He sighed and felt the movement of the air shuddering out of his body. He closed his eyes, listened to the welcome silence.

The door to the toilet opened and he heard shuffling footsteps on the other side of the cubicle wall. The manager blinked and his trickle of coffee-clear pee dried up. He heard a cough, them someone spitting phlegm into a urinal. He heard unzipping then a stream of piss – something marking its territory, he thought.

He told himself that of course there was no way of knowing who it was; and even if he did know what did it matter? Still, he hugged his knees up to his chest, so that his feet wouldn’t be visible in the gap beneath the cubicle wall.

The sound outside stopped and he heard someone zipping themselves up. Then they moved to the sinks, which were even closer to his cubicle – he almost flinched in physical aversion to the person just a few meters away. He heard the sound of someone washing their hands, then the sound of the automatic hand drier – a roaring, wind-like noise that hid any sounds of the person moving outside. His heart faltered then sped up. The sound of the drier was on for a long time, then stopped. There was no noise from the other side of the cubicle. The person must have left. Still, the manager wasn’t sure that he wanted to unlock the door quite yet. For some reason he had the fear that he would throw open the door and see a slightly different world, or a different face in the mirror. But gradually he relaxed. He put his aching legs back on the ground.

Suddenly the door to the toilet cubicle shook, rattling on its hinges. Someone was shaking it from outside, trying to get in! His mind convulsed and stammered the three syllables of Jay Neuworth’s name. He shrank back on the toilet and gave a cry of fear. The door rattled again, and the screw holding the bolt in place became even looser. Not that it mattered, for there was splintering wood around the other screws too: one way or the other it was getting in...

The rattling stopped as suddenly as it had started. He remained still with his trousers around his ankles, but he didn’t hear anyone walking away.

~

The e-mail was dated four days previous, and from his manager. The title of it was
Re Our Previous Talk
but he hadn’t yet opened it to read the contents. Before he finally did so he looked around, to make sure no one was behind him, watching. For he felt that there was, and worse than watching, they were moving forward with palms raised...

The first thing he noticed about the mail was that it had been sent out to his sub-managers too. The sight of their names irritated him, and he looked around again. Then he read the mail, and he couldn’t believe it. The phrases swam before his tired eyes:

...obviously out of touch with your staff, old and new, since your absence... after what has happened, team spirit needs to be rebuilt and that is your... a team nigh out... out of the budget... For all three of the senior members of the team, attendance is of course required. The date for the proposed night out was four days after the mail had been sent; the night was tonight.

The manager stood up, and felt his vision waver. He laid a hand against the office wall to steady himself, and felt it vibrate under his trembling palm. Outside, the wind howled; a siren sound raced far below him...

~

Then someone had pointed upwards, and screamed.

He turned to look. His eyes travelled up the office block, looking for flames or billowing smoke, looking for a red sky lit behind, heralding disaster. But its walls and windows were as grey and meaningless as ever, and his eyes strained over its dull surface looking for something that might have caused someone to cry out like that. The screaming continued behind him, but he saw just the building stark and sharp-edged against the clear blue. But then his gaze swung right to the
very
top, above the twelfth-floor windows, to the roof, and he saw what he had been looking for.

And here it had started, for the building started swaying in his vision.

At the top of the building was a figure. And the manager took an involuntary step backwards, for it felt like
he
was on the roof and looking down... But instead, the figure was looking down, and it was familiar to him. He could see the slouched posture, the lank hair being whipped by the wind into an unruly and wavering mane. He didn’t know exactly who it was, but he knew it was someone for whom he was responsible. The screams and shouts increased; the manager could sense movement and sounds of fear behind him.

How had Jay got up there? By one of the fire-escapes? Of course, the manager thought with an odd calmness, he had opened one of the fire-doors to get up there, and that was what had set off the alarms. What was he
doing
up there? Logically, he could be preparing to unfurl an anti-CO2 banner or make some other kind of protest, and part of him was yet again planning to call the temp agency... But equally, the part of him that was absorbing all the fear and panic of those behind him knew this was no protest. And this double-vision of the brain persisted even as the figure took its first step towards the edge of the building.

It took three steps – they didn’t appear to be dramatic or decisive, just shuffles, like someone dawdling to a job that they didn’t like, and then the figure was falling. Just three everyday steps, and the figure had looked
behind
him whilst taking the last one... As easy as walking into the road looking in the wrong direction. The figure had been up on the roof for only a few moments; not long enough for the firemen to be halfway there; not long enough for any negotiations or explanations. The boy’s fall seemed drawn out and insidious, falling in the manager’s vision slowly and even lazily. There seemed to be little momentum; the fall didn’t seem
irredeemable
but something that could be reversed even at this late stage.

And then the boy hit the ground and then there was very little left to see.  Time sped up again. The firemen rushed forward, both blocking his view of what now lay on the pavement, and turning to avoid seeing it themselves.
How dare he?
he thought idiotically. The manager stepped backwards, and almost tripped. His clipboard fell to the floor. Turning around, he found that it was his manager that he had backed into. She had been looking at him; they had
all
been looking at him, his sub-managers and the whole pack of the rest of them, swaying in his vision like landmarks glimpsed from sea. He had wanted to look away from everyone, but the clear and bright day that engulfed him when he did so had been somehow worse....

Attendance is of course required
, he thought, with his hand against the office wall. So that was when it would happen, whatever ‘it’ was. He walked out his small office and looked at the ‘new boy’; and Jay Neuworth looked back at him with the same blank look in his eyes that he must have had falling... The manager went back into his own office, and tried to work late.

~

Instead he looked out the window at the city below him which seemed to grow sharper in his vision as he watched – the light from the setting sun was clear and highlighted the differences between things, the jagged edges. It was like looking down from cliffs to the rocks below. I’m on the top-floor, he thought, Jay was on the roof. It’s pretty much the same view.